by John Scalzi
“Hey,” Schmidt said.
“No-” Wilson held up a hand. “I mean that as a compliment. And I think you’re exactly right. Whoever did in the Polk wanted to make it difficult for us to find out what happened to it.”
“If we could get to that debris field, we could take samples,” Schmidt said.
“No time,” Wilson said. “And right now finding what happened to the Polk is the means to an end. We still have to be reasonably sure this is what’s left of the Polk, though. So how do we do that?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Schmidt said.
“Think, Hart,” Wilson said. He waved at the monitor image. “What happened to the rest of the Polk?”
“It probably got vaporized,” Schmidt said.
“Right,” Wilson said, and waited.
“Okay,” Schmidt said. “So?”
Wilson sighed. “You were raised by a tribe of chimps, weren’t you, Hart?” he asked.
“I didn’t know I’d be taking a science test today, Harry,” Schmidt said, annoyed.
“You said it already,” Wilson said. “The ship was probably vaporized. Whoever did this to the Polk took the time to cut, slice and blast into molecules most of it. But they probably didn’t cart all the atoms off with them.”
Schmidt’s eyes widened. “A big cloud of vaporized Polk,” he said.
“You got it,” Wilson said, and the display changed to show a large, amorphous blob, tentacles stretching out from the main body.
“That’s the ship?” Schmidt asked, looking at the blob.
“I’d say yes,” Wilson said. “One of the extra scans I had Captain Coloma run was a spectrographic analysis of the local neighborhood. It’s not a scan we’d usually do.”
“Why not?” Schmidt asked.
“Why would we?” Wilson said. “Searching your immediate environment for molecule-sized bits of frigate isn’t a standard protocol. Spectrographic analysis is usually reserved for science missions where someone’s sampling atmospheric gases. Spaceships themselves typically don’t have to be concerned with gases unless we’re near a planet and we have to figure out how far out the atmosphere extends. And with systems we’ve already surveyed, all that information is already in the database. I’m guessing whoever did this probably knew all of that. They weren’t concerned that an invisible cloud of metallic atoms would give them away.”
“They didn’t think we’d see it,” Schmidt said.
“And normally they’d be right,” Wilson said, and pulled out the view to capture all the other debris fields. “None of the other debris fields show the same density of molecular particles, and what particles there are aren’t the same sorts of metals we use to make our ships.” He pulled the view in again. “So this is almost certainly what’s left of the Polk, and it was almost certainly intentionally attacked and methodically destroyed.”
“Which means that someone leaked the information,” Schmidt said. “This mission was meant to be secret.”
Wilson nodded. “Yes, but that’s not anything you and I have to worry about at the moment. We’re still looking for the black box. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that this narrows down considerably the volume of space we need to search.”
“So we go back to the first scan and start picking through those remaining bits of the Polk,” Schmidt said.
“We could do that,” Wilson said. “If we had a month.”
“This is where you make me look stupid again, isn’t it,” Schmidt said.
“No, I’m going to spare you this time because the answer isn’t obvious,” Wilson said.
“That’s a relief,” Schmidt said.
“To go back to your suggestion, even if we did go through the earlier scans, we’d be unlikely to come up with anything,” Wilson said. “Remember that the CDF wants the black box to be found only by its own people.”
“That’s why the black box is black,” Schmidt said.
“Not just black, but aggressively nonreflective,” Wilson said. “Covered with a fractal coating that absorbs most radiation that hits it and scatters the rest of it. Sweep it with a sensor scan and nothing comes back directly. From the point of view of a sensor array, it doesn’t exist.”
“All right, Harry Wilson, supergenius,” Schmidt said. “If you can’t see it and can’t sweep for it, then how do you find it?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Wilson said. “When I was thinking about the black box, my brain wandered to the phrase ‘black body.’ It’s an idealized physical object that absorbs every bit of radiation thrown at it.”
“Like you said this thing does,” Schmidt said.
“Sort of,” Wilson said. “The black box is not a perfect black body; nothing is. But it reminded me that any object in the real world that absorbed all the radiation thrown at it would heat up. And then I remembered that the black box came equipped with a battery to power its processor and inertial dampener. And that the battery is not one hundred percent efficient.”
Schmidt looked at Wilson blankly.
“It’s warm, Hart,” Wilson said. “The black box had a power source. That power source leaked heat. That heat kept it relatively warm long after everything else around it entropied itself into equilibrium.”
“The battery is dead,” Schmidt said. “Even if it was warm, it wouldn’t be anymore.”
“That depends on your definition of ‘warm,’” Wilson said. “The design of the black box means that it has some areas inside of it acting like insulators. Even if the battery’s dead, it’ll take longer for the black box to reach a temperature equilibrium with space than it would if it were a solid shard of metal. I don’t need it to be warm like the inside of this room, Hart. I just need it to be a fraction of a degree warmer than everything else around it.”
The display screen flickered and the ghostly blob of attenuated Polk molecules was replaced by a thermal map that was a deep blue black. Wilson gave the thermal map his attention.
“So you’re looking for something that’s ever so slightly above absolute zero,” Schmidt said.
“Space is actually a couple of degrees above absolute zero,” Wilson said. “Particularly inside a planetary system.”
“Seems like an irrelevant detail,” Schmidt said.
“And you call yourself a scientist,” Wilson said.
“No, I don’t,” Schmidt said.
“Good thing, then,” Wilson said.
“So what happens if it has entropied out?” Schmidt said. “If it’s the same temperature as everything else around it?”
“Well, then, we’re screwed,” Wilson said.
“I don’t love your bracing honesty,” Schmidt said.
“Ha!” Wilson said, and suddenly the image in the display pitched inward, falling vertiginously toward something that was invisible until almost the last second, and was an only slightly lighter blue-black than everything around it even then.
“Is that it?” Schmidt asked.
“Let me change the false color temperature scale,” Wilson said. The object, spherical, suddenly blossomed green.
“That’s the black box,” Schmidt said.
“It’s the right size and shape,” Wilson said. “If it’s not the black box, the universe is messing with us. There are some other warmer objects out there, but they’re not the right size profile.”
“What are they?” Schmidt asked.
Wilson shrugged. “Possibly chunks of the Polk with sealed pockets of air in them. Right now, don’t know, don’t care.” He pointed at the sphere. “This is what we came for.”
Schmidt peered closely at the image. “How much warmer is it than everything around it?” he asked.
“Point zero zero three degrees Kelvin,” Wilson said. “Another hour or two and we would never have found it.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Schmidt said. “It makes me retroactively nervous.”
“Science is built on tiny variances, my friend,” Wilson said.
“So now what
?” Schmidt asked.
“Now I get to tell Captain Coloma to warm up the shuttle, and you get to tell your boss that if this mission fails, it will be because of her, not us,” Wilson said.
“I think I’ll avoid putting it that way,” Schmidt said.
“That’s why you’re the diplomat,” Wilson said.
VII
The discussion with Captain Coloma was not entirely pleasant. She demanded a rundown of the protocol used to locate the black box, which Wilson provided, quickly, his eye on the clock. Wilson suspected the captain hadn’t expected him to locate the black box within the time allotted to him and was nonplussed when he had, and was now trying to manufacture a reason not to let him at the shuttle. In the end she couldn’t manufacture one, although for security reasons, she said, she didn’t release the shuttle pilot. Wilson wondered, if something bad happened to the shuttle while it was in his possession, what good it would do to have a shuttle pilot on board the Clarke. But in this as in many things, he let it go, smiled, saluted, and then thanked the captain for her cooperation.
The shuttle was designed for transport rather than for retrieval, which meant that Wilson would have to do some improvisation. One of the improvisations would include opening the interior of the shuttle to the hard vacuum of space, which was a prospect that did not excite Wilson, for several reasons. He pored over the shuttle specifications to see whether the thing could handle such an event; the Clarke was a diplomatic rather than a military ship, which meant it and everything in it had been constructed in civilian shipyards and possibly on different plans from those of the military ships and shuttles Wilson had become used to. Fortunately, Wilson discovered, the diplomatic shuttle, while its interior was designed with civilian needs in mind, shared the same chassis and construction as its military counterparts. A little hard vacuum wouldn’t kill it.
The same could not be said for Wilson. Vacuum would kill him, although more slowly than it would anyone else on the Clarke. Wilson had been out of combat for years, but he was still a member of the Colonial Defense Forces and still had the genetic and other improvements given to soldiers, including SmartBlood, artificial blood that carried more oxygen and allowed his body to survive significantly longer without breathing than that of an unmodified human. When Wilson first arrived on the Clarke, one of his icebreaker tricks with the diplomatic staff had been holding his breath while they clocked him with a timer; they usually got bored when he hit the five-minute mark.
Be that as it may, there was a manifest difference between holding one’s breath in the Clarke’s lounge and staying conscious while airless, cold vacuum surrounding you as the air in your body was trying to burst out of your lungs and into space. A little protection was in order.
Which is how, for the first time in more than a dozen years, Wilson found himself in his standard-issue Colonial Defense Forces combat unitard.
“That’s a new look,” Schmidt said, smiling, as Wilson walked toward the shuttle.
“That’s enough out of you,” Wilson said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in one of those things,” Schmidt said. “I didn’t even know you had one.”
“Regulations require active-duty CDF to travel with a combat unitard even on noncombat postings,” Wilson said. “On the theory it’s a hostile universe and we should be prepared at all times to kill anyone we meet.”
“It’s an interesting philosophy,” Schmidt said. “Where’s your gun?”
“It’s not a gun,” Wilson said. “It’s an MP-35. And I left it in my storage locker. I don’t really anticipate having to shoot the black box.”
“A dicey risk,” Schmidt said.
“When I want a military assessment from you, Hart, I’ll be sure to let you know,” Wilson said.
Schmidt smiled again and then held up what he was carrying. “Maybe this will be to your liking, then,” he said. “CDF-issue hard connector with battery.”
“Thanks,” Wilson said. The black box was dead; he’d need to put a little power into it in order to wake up the transmitter.
“Are you ready to fly this thing?” Schmidt asked, nodding toward the shuttle.
“I’ve already plotted a path to the black box, and put it into the router,” Wilson said. “There’s also a standard departure routine. I’ve chained the departure routine to the predetermined path. Reverse everything on the way home. As long as I’m not required to actually try to pilot, I’ll be fine.”
What the hell? Wilson thought. On his shuttle’s forward monitor, on which he had pumped up light source collection to see star patterns over the glare of his instrument panel, another star had become occluded. That was two in the last thirty seconds. There was some object in the path between him and the black box.
He frowned, powered the shuttle into motionlessness, and pulled up the data from the surveys he’d run on the Clarke.
He saw the object on the survey; another one of the debris chunks that had been ever so slightly warmer than the surrounding space. It was large enough that if the shuttle collided with it, there would be damage.
Looks like I have to pilot after all, Wilson thought. He was annoyed with himself that he hadn’t applied his survey data to his shuttle plot; he now had to waste time replotting his course.
“Is there a problem?” Schmidt asked, voice coming through the instrument panel.
“Everything’s fine,” Wilson said. “Something in my way. Routing around it.” The survey heat data noted the object’s size as approximately three to four meters on a side, which made it considerably larger than anything that the standard scans had picked up, but not so large that it required a major change in pathing. Wilson created a new path that dropped the shuttle 250 meters below the object and resumed travel to the black box from there, and he inserted it into the navigational router, which accepted the change without complaint. Wilson resumed his journey, watching the monitors to see the object in his way occlude a few other stars as the shuttle moved relative to it.
The shuttle arrived at the black box a few moments later. Wilson couldn’t see it with his own eyes, but after he had first located it he’d run supplementary scans that fixed its location to within about ten centimeters, which was precise enough for what he was about to do. He fired up the final navigational sequence, which made a series of minute maneuvers. This took another minute.
“Here we go,” Wilson said, and commanded his unitard to wrap around his face, which it did with a snap. Wilson hated the feeling of the unitard’s face mask; it felt as if someone had tightly duct-taped his entire head. It was simply better than the alternative in this case. Wilson’s vision was totally blocked by his face mask; his BrainPal compensated by feeding him a visual stream.
That accomplished, Wilson commanded the shuttle to air out the interior. The shuttle’s compressors sprang to life, sucking the shuttle’s air back into its tanks. Three minutes later, the interior of the shuttle had almost as little open air in it as the space surrounding it.
Wilson cut off the shuttle’s artificial gravity, unstrapped himself from the shuttle pilot chair and very gingerly pushed off toward the shuttle door, stopping himself directly in front of it and gripping the guide handle on its side to keep himself from drifting. He pressed the door release, and the door slid into the wall of the shuttle. There was an almost imperceptible whisper as the few remaining free molecules of human-friendly atmosphere rushed out the open portal.
Still holding the guide handle, Wilson reached out into space-gently! — and after a second wrapped his fingers around an object. He pulled it in.
It was the black box.
Excellent, Wilson thought, and released the guide handle to press the door button and seal the interior of the shuttle once more. He commanded the shuttle to start pumping air back into the cabin and to turn the artificial gravity back on-and nearly dropped the black box when he did. It was heavier than it looked.
After a minute, Wilson retracted his face mask and took a physically unnece
ssary but psychologically satisfying huge gulp of air. He walked back to the pilot’s chair, retrieved the hard connector and then spent several minutes looking at the box’s inscrutable surface, searching for the tiny hole he could plunge the connector into. He finally located it, lanced the box with the connector, felt it click into position, and waited the thirty required seconds for enough energy to transfer over and power up the black box’s receiver and transmitter.
With his BrainPal, he transmitted the encrypted signal to the black box. There was a pause, followed by a stream of information pushed into Wilson’s BrainPal fast enough that he almost felt it physically.
The last moments of the Polk.
Wilson started scanning the information with his BrainPal as quickly as he could begin opening the data.
In less than a minute, he confirmed what they already strongly suspected: that the Polk had been attacked and destroyed in the battle.
A minute after that, he learned that one escape pod had been launched from the Polk but that it appeared to have been destroyed less than ten seconds before the black box itself had been launched, cutting out its own data feed. Wilson guessed that the occupant of the escape pod would have been the mission ambassador or someone on her staff.
Three minutes after that, he learned something else.
“Oh shit,” Wilson said, out loud.
“I just heard an ‘Oh shit,’” Schmidt said, from the instrument panel.
“Hart, you need to get Abumwe and Coloma on the line, right now,” Wilson said.
“The ambassador’s in her preparatory briefings right now,” Schmidt said. “She’s not going to want to be interrupted.”
“She’s going to be a lot more upset with you if you don’t interrupt her,” Wilson said. “Trust me on this.”
“The Polk was attacked by what?” Abumwe said. She and Coloma were tied into a conference video, Coloma from her ready room and Abumwe from a spare conference room Schmidt had almost had to drag her into.
“By at least fifteen Melierax Series Seven ship-to-ship missiles,” Wilson said, talking into the pilot instrument panel and the small camera there. “It could have been more, because data started getting sketchy after enough systems failed. But it was at least fifteen.”
